Argentine Arcadia   Sept 13 - Oct 6, 2007
Works by Mónica Millán

THUMBNAILS  |  PRICELIST  |  PRESS RELEASE


MÓNICA MILLÁN (b. 1960)


BIOGRAPHY

Lavish and sumptuous, Mónica Millán’s “gardens” and “rivers” flow, surge, and roil. They evoke the movement of water, subterranean realms, overfilled gardens, picnics by the sea, luxuriant tropical jungles, but the forms in these works are not natural; none are even individually or botanically recognizable, and they are made of constructed materials, foreign to their subject matter. Millán has transformed a natural world into a fantastic version of itself, a child’s idealization of nature, a fairy tale, or a pure expression of nature’s freedom. There is also a sense, though, of beauty taken too far, to such an extreme as to stir up a sinister undercurrent of possible danger and tension. As the artist has built her works three-dimensionally within space, the uncertainties of distance and scale evoke our ambiguous relationship to nature.

Then, standing back and taking a more distant perspective, we are aware of these creations for their craftsmanship. Although Millán’s process involves acting on instinct, the work is clearly labor-intensive and obsessive, consisting of embroidering, braiding, beading, and knot-tying, which she uses to produce intricate connections, tiers, and overlays. The works seem to lack seams and edges, making it extremely difficult to follow the twisted skeins and determine what holds these pieces together. Yet we cannot stand back passively and pensively. It is necessary to let go of our sense of space and the need to quantify and identify. Only by becoming involved in these works can we receive what they have to give us; we can only get energy out of them by putting in energy of our own.

Millán’s drawings have a similar effect of calling our attention first to their sheer visual splendor. Natural and floral forms seem to materialize and bloom as if by magical invocation against monochromatic fields of miniaturistic detail. On a closer look, we become aware of the artist’s meticulous draftsmanship and wonder at a process that involves working in the dark from a single projected beam of light.

While invoking the history of Arcadian imagery, from the eighteenth-century dreamscapes portraying lush bowers, through French Impressionist celebrations of suburban outdoor amusements, Millán’s interactive nature-based fairy tales, in needing our engagement, are ultimately metaphors, calls to leave behind our jaded and dispassionate selves.

Mónica Millán was born in 1960 in San Ignacio, in the Misiones Province of Argentina. In 1984 she graduated with degrees in drawing and painting from the Instituto Superior del Profesorado Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (Tertiary Institute of Teaching Training Antonio Ruiz de Montoya), in Posadas, Misiones. From 1986 to 1988, she continued her studies in Buenos Aires under Luis Felipe Noé, a leading figure in the Neo-Expressionist painting movement in Argentina.

Millán began exhibiting her work in 1989, when a solo show of her work, Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers) was held at the Anthropological Museum Andrés Guacurari in Posadas. In 1992 she was included in 4 Artistas de Misiones (Four Artists of Argentina’s Missions), held at the Center of Visual Arts in Asunción, Paraguay. Subsequently Millán has been featured in many individual and group shows, most notably New Painters (1998, Museum of Fine Art Juan Yapari, Posadas), Gardens of Engaño (1999, Cultural Center Borges, Buenos Aires), Biennial of the Critic (2000, Castagnino Museum, Rosario, Argentina), Garden of Resonances (2001, Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada), Earth States (2004, Center for Cultural Cooperation, Buenos Aires), Interfaces (2006, traveling exhibition at various Argentinean museums), and Kissing Frogs (2007, Cultural Center Borges).

Millán was the recipient of scholarships from the Antorchas Foundation (1996 and 1997), the Telefónica Foundation (1997), and the Rockefeller Foundation (2002 and 2003). In 2000 she received a “Trama” scholarship to participate in workshops under the guidance of Richard Deacon, Jaroslav Koslowsky, Victor Grippo, and León Ferrari.

Beginning in 1997, Millán has coordinated exhibitions and held clinics and seminars in Argentina’s northeastern region. With the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation, since 2002 she has worked with a group of weavers in a village in Paraguay, where she has been counseled by the art critic Ticio Escobar, the founder and director of the Museo de Arte Indigena from the Centro de Artes Visuales of Asunción.